lot outside the Lodge. I stayed in my room when Daddy opened the door and ushered her inside. I feigned sleep when he called out my name.
I pretended that her raspy voice was only the sound of rotten leaves covering the road. Ice in their glasses became the sound of bells, their breathing only wind. But her laughter inevitably exploded into the rumble of a smoker’s cough, her insides rattling, and I listened to the unmistakable sound of Daddy cooing at her. To the sound of her fingers touching Daddy’s collar, chest, beard. I strained to hear their bare feet move down the hall into my mother’s room. But then I heard the front door creak open and the sounds of leaving.
Tears welled up in my eyes, hot and certain, at her departure. I should have known that Daddy couldn’t replace my mother just like that. I should have trusted that he would always love her. He would send Roxanne back to where he had found her.
In the morning, I woke up tangled in my sheets. Outside the sun was bright and cold. Winter was only moments away. I pulled on the brown sweater I’d most recently brought home from Boo’s, my thumb getting stuck in a mothhole near the cuff. I pushed harder, until it ripped, until my thumb was sticking all the way through. I left my jammie bottoms on and pulled on a pair of wool socks.
Quinn was at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal, making a fist around his spoon. I sat down across from him, listening for the sounds of Daddy’s shower.
“You workin’ today?” I asked.
Quinn looked up from his cereal and shook his head.
“Feels like snow.” I nodded. Quinn was on the ski team at school. He was always happiest in winter.
“He left with her, you know,” he said.
“What?” I asked, picking up the cereal box, staring at the nutrition label on the side, looking for an explanation that might appear there. Sugar, calcium, saturated fat. But I already knew.
Daddy and Roxanne were both gone, along with all of Daddy’s clothes I had washed and folded and set on top of the dryer. Along with his razor and toothbrush and his deodorant. Along with his winter boots, even though there wasn’t any snow on the ground yet.
Hope. This is my mother’s true and cruel legacy. When I was a child, I hoped she would come back. At thirty, I only hope that I will live. And live and live. This is my inheritance. My endowment, my trust. A handful of sand and broken glass.
When the doctors confirmed what I already knew, I hoped. I listened to their statistics in their cold waiting rooms as my nipples hardened against the rough blue paper dresses. I looked at the charts and diagrams and grim smiles and hoped. We scheduled the surgery and, later, my treatments. I bought beautiful scarves, drank liquid vegetables and fruits. I vomited and imagined cancer nothing more than stomach bile, acidic and expendable. And I hoped.
Even though I’ve stopped going to the hospital for treatments, Becca still brings home articles she prints off the Internet about experimental procedures, about women who have prevailed despite the illness that has battered them. Each story of success and the accompanying picture of the face that belongs to the body inspires a strange desire. Hope is really just desire disguised, just desperation, aching, dressed up like a prayer. But while hope is elusive, desire is something I can understand. I have wanted and wanted and wanted. I can’t even count all of the things I have wanted. To have. To do. To be. It’s like the familiar longing for a lover; it resides in my heart and in my body. I want to be well again.
Hope has become the same as sunlight. Some days it is warm on my shoulders and back. Some days it’s just gone. It doesn’t worry me, it’s just missing. I know you can no easier lose hope than you can lose sunlight. There is never any doubt hope will return. But I am waiting. There have been too many cloudy days lately.
I’ve started misplacing things and finding them later. Small surprises. Yesterday, I found a pair of scissors in the refrigerator. This morning I found a pincushion under my pillow. It’s making work difficult. I work at home, sewing wedding dresses and prom dresses, making costumes and mending holes. At least the sewing machine is too heavy for me to absentmindedly pick up and move.
I am making a wedding dress for a twenty-nine-year-old widow. Her first husband died of meningitis three weeks after their wedding. It came on suddenly: a fever, then blindness, and then she was alone in a brand-new house with a pile of wedding gifts waiting to be unwrapped. I didn’t ask, but she offered this story to me, almost as if she were sorry. As if she had to explain falling in love again.
She wants a dress that makes her look like Juliet. I went to Boston and bought ten yards of silk chiffon, embroidered with golden thread. When I showed her the bolt, she unrolled it on my living room floor, careful to blow away the dust bunnies before she smoothed her hand across the fabric. And after she had rolled it back up, she held the fabric to her face and started to cry.
“Don’t think I’m terrible,” she said softly.
“I don’t,” I said.
When someone dies, there always has to be someone left behind. She doesn’t know that I am studying her, that she is teaching me the gestures of survivors.
I stopped working when I first got sick, entertaining romantic notions of dying, mostly that it would be my primary obligation. I thought the world as I knew it would stop for me now that I was sick. But dying isn’t the way I imagined it. Credit card companies still want their minimum payments; landlords still want their rent. So my hiatus was short-lived, and I am glad now for the distraction that sewing provides. But even when my hands are busy, my mind is still free. It wanders farther than it used to. I suppose that’s why today I found my tape measure wound around Bog’s dog dish and the iron propping up a row of books on my mantel.
Sometimes I worry about the other things I stand to lose. My faith, my temper, my way. I have lost weight. My hair. Great portions of my breasts. But unlike my scissors and pins, they don’t seem to be coming back. I know that other things will go unless I get better, there is still plenty to lose.
He lost his child. Felicity. He was reluctant to tell me how. It wasn’t as easy as describing the peace in his wife’s face or the way the lights reflected off her seatbelt buckle and the broken windshield, blinding him. Felicity, happiness. I still wonder if he was just trying to tell me that after his wife was dead, he lost his happiness.
Becca, who has reappeared after all these years (an auburn-haired angel from some other time), assures me that I have held on to the most important things. Dignity. My sense of humor. And, most important, my voice. She knows, as I know, because she was there when I found it, that if I were ever to lose it again, I would have to let go. That losing my voice would mean losing hope.
My mother said that I always sang myself to sleep, so there was never any need for lullabies. I know now she told me this to make me believe I could take care of myself. To prepare me for her departure.
She said I began humming Brahms’s Lullaby as an infant, and that later the music became unidentifiable, my own and strange. She said it was terrifying, holding on to me as I sang myself to sleep. I don’t remember singing, but I do remember her arms.
Sometimes I still sing without realizing it. Singing is as unconscious to me as breathing or swallowing or blinking my eyes. Trying to control it is like holding my breath.
After my mother left, I became quiet. For a little while, I thought that maybe she had taken my voice with her, along with the good Phillips-head screwdriver and her only pair of heels. But I must have known she wouldn’t take that away from me, no more than
